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  What had Willie Mae said? “If you could just set that stomach down for a spell, and then when you picked it back up again, get a better holt on it.”

  Lee saw the invention while she dressed: an elaboration of a brassiere, weight-bearing in a different manner, white cloth and elastic, two narrow straps at the neck enlarging into a sling under the pregnant abdomen. She imagined she’d sew one up herself, try it out, sell the idea to Maidenform for a million dollars. Then she’d never have to sew another hem, never need Ray’s twenties again. She’d spend thirty dollars on groceries every week and hire Willie Mae full-time.

  The phone rang and when Lee answered, someone hung up. Then, immediately, it rang again, and David Palmer, without saying hello, said hurriedly, “I have to talk to you, Mrs. Bettlemain.”

  “Okay,” Lee said, and took a deep breath. “Tuesday, at one o’clock, at the rectory.” She said it like the spy who knows the reply to the secret password.

  “Good,” David Palmer answered and hung up without saying good-bye.

  For the rest of the day, in a flurry of energy, Lee cleaned, drove, sewed, all the while thinking: It couldn’t have worked out better if she’d planned it.

  Chapter 11

  There is nothing to write about except sex and death.

  Norman LaHood of Valdoota, Georgia

  Everything that morning had a disconnected quality, but still she moved, did what was required. Now, everyone was in his or her place: Charles at work, Cassie at school, and Lill in Willie Mae’s care—and she was here, at the rectory. For some reason she’d thought that something would have changed, but no, all was the same. She’d parked the car and come in through the back, as she’d done that first time, to hide from Father Kennedy. The space in the fence under the blackjack oaks was still there, the three-paned windows of back door to the rectory, the white tab of a door bell—everything the same.

  Only me, she thought. Only she was different, altered, moving with that heavy grace she admired in other pregnant women, but found cumbersome and unlikable in herself.

  Father Palmer opened the door. “Are you feeling better?” he asked, and held her hand in both of his, and for one instant she thought he might raise it to his lips. The old-fashioned, romantic gesture would have thrilled her, but also would have made her suspicious, would have been too easy. So it was just as well that he didn’t. Her hand in his, her arm felt unrelated to her body as though the nerves had been severed, and she could watch but not feel.

  “You’ve cut your hair.” He looked up.

  “No, just pulled it back.” She turned her head to show the clasp that held almost all of her black hair down at the nape of her neck. She’d worn one of her plain white dresses and caught her hair in a tortoise-shell barrette. She wasn’t trying to be attractive this time.

  He motioned her to follow him into the dining room, and they stood next to a large dark wooden table; around it, curved-backed chairs with stitched cushions looked ready for a banquet. On a far wall hung a gold-framed mirror above a long-legged sideboard, and on it sat a great silver coffee service gleaming like a suit of armor. In another corner was a baby-grand piano and under it another Persian rug, a lighter cousin to the one upstairs in his room. On the table, a pottery bowl sat, full of the hot-pink azaleas that grew everywhere in Strickland.

  Pointing with the hand David Palmer had just released, Lee said, “Those will be wilted by tomorrow.”

  “Well, uh, Algebra brings them in fresh every day. She says fresh flowers are the finishing touch. I guess she’s right.” He looked over at the deep pink blooms as if trying to read something on their fringed, pollen-dusted petals.

  Lee shifted, put both her hands to her back, jutting her stomach out.

  “Oh, please, come into the study. Uh, so we can sit and talk.” Too formal, he opened a door next to the sideboard. “May I get you something to drink?”

  She followed into a smaller room with two striped satin couches, more dark furniture, a desk, bookshelves. She said, “Some of that red wine would be nice, what we had last time. Marquesa de Riscal? Isn’t that what you called it?”

  She knew the name precisely, had repeated it a hundred times to herself since that afternoon. Anytime she saw a commercial for wine on TV, anytime a couple in a novel toasted, she whispered, “Marquesa de Riscal.”

  “Of course,” he said, narrowing his gray eyes for a second, and then leaving, closing the door behind him.

  She sat down on one of the facing couches. The room was a picture out of a magazine, the desktop a wide, polished plane holding nothing but a perfect desk set and calendar. French doors behind the desk let in broad bands of light and revealed a small courtyard surrounded by a high fence. A molded statue of St. Francis stood guard by a pond of green scum.

  The priest returned, opened the door in a clumsy manner with one hand, holding a tray with the wine decanter and glasses in the other. All this formality and awkwardness on his part put Lee at some sort of advantage and took away the numbness she’d felt all morning. The decanter was the same one he’d brought upstairs that afternoon, the glasses the same two square-cut shapes on the same tray.

  He placed the tray on the desk and poured the wine. His hand trembled, and drops slid down the stem of one glass, catching the light, streaking the glass column with crimson. He handed the wine glass to Lee and sat, putting the desk between them, leaning back in a tall-backed chair, and without a toast or a word sipped the red liquid.

  What had he said before? “To the beautiful Lee.” She tasted the wine.

  “Should you be drinking alcohol?” he asked, glancing down at her stomach. “I mean ….” The question dwindled away. Then, for some seconds, he looked up to the top of the room and then to the French doors by the desk and then back again. And then, he stared outside at the narrow strip of yard between the house and the wooden fence.

  Lee stood up slowly, brought the glass to her lips, gulped a large swallow of the thick red fluid and felt its warmth slide down into emptiness. She walked to the French doors and looked out, too. “Don’t worry, I drink milk all the time. I drank a big glass this morning.” Beyond the window squares was an aged wooden fence, a partial concrete wall under it, a forgotten crusty statue of St. Francis, a stained, miniature concrete pond.

  “Well, I’m sure you know how to take care of yourself—you… you’ve had other children.”

  She turned and irritably asked, “What do you want? I need to get back to the other children.”

  He didn’t move or speak. An ashen green shadow sat beneath each of his eyes. He leaned forward against the desk, wiped his hair back with his palms, kept his hands on his head, and intoned, “Do you know that in seventeen years I’ve never missed saying Mass? Not one day! No matter what.” He paused.

  Lee could hear his breathing, raspy.

  “I’ve always given half of my donations for baptisms and weddings to the collection. I’ve never taken liberties with church money, never used it for long distance calls or a car payment. Never. Not once.”

  He was breathing louder now. Lee matched her breaths to his in order to hear better. Was he going to cry?

  “Now, I don’t know. What can I do? It’s a punishment. I’m being shown that I, too, can fall.” He brought his hands, ridged with knuckle lines and corded with blue veins, over his face and kept them there, silent.

  With an actual pain, like a blade sliding between her ribs, Lee decided to tell the truth. Immediately, it came clear what the truth was, almost as though she’d forgotten: the baby wasn’t David Palmer’s. Why was he so quick to believe?

  The pain, sharp and solid, moved into her chest. She turned from the French windows, moved behind him, and placed her hands on his shoulders, ready to explain the misunderstanding in Confession, ready to say, “Don’t worry. Charles is the father,” but the word “Charles” was all she said when David Palmer turned and grasped her around the mid-section and pressed his head against her large belly.

  “I know.
I know. You don’t have to tell me. I hear it all the time in Confession. I see it with so many couples. I saw it with you right from the beginning.”

  “What?” Lee asked.

  “You married someone you hardly knew, not Lebanese, not even Catholic. You came down from Atlanta, away from your family—away from everything important to you. Father Kennedy told me.” He spoke against her body, but it was as though he was talking to himself, as though he’d gone through these reasons before. “Your parents are old-fashioned. Once a daughter marries, she belongs to the other family. You came down here to this backwoods place with no friends, no family. The Bettlemains aren’t even Catholic.” In uneven, disjointed sentences, he explained her marriage to her, as if it were a common enough story, hardly needing an explanation. “Your husband and his family have no education. They don’t understand.”

  Lee pushed away. “I never told Father Kennedy anything of the sort.”

  “No, no, of course not. He never said that.” David Palmer raised his hands wide, protesting, but immediately locked them back around her. “We discussed your circumstances in a very circuitous way, I promise you. He didn’t know why I was curious. I was asking questions about the whole parish. But it’s what anyone can see. You loved your husband, but then with children and daily life …. He never comes to Mass.”

  “Yes, that part is true,” Lee almost laughed. “But it’s not like you think, not at all.” There was no way to explain. “Charles was different when I first met him, so good-looking and gentle. Now, he works so hard with his brother and father, all day long, becoming more and more like them. They’re plumbers, you know. It’s hard work—physically hard.”

  She stopped. The priest’s desk, polished and uncluttered as a piece of furniture in a showcase, the accusation of an easier life lay before them. The priest took his arms away, held her hands again, in both of his, pressed his lips into her palms.

  “Don’t blame yourself, Lee. I’m the one who’s to blame. I thought I had all that out of my system. But from the very beginning, when I first saw you at the back of the church. I couldn’t stop watching you, couldn’t help thinking.”

  “I know. I felt it, too.”

  “And that day at the dentist. It’s as though I was given an excuse: I was drugged. You stayed in the room with me, you washed my face—you kissed me.”

  He looked up, for the first time directly, not averting his eyes. And without hesitation, Lee kissed his forehead, kissed his eyes closed, kissed the dark circles and his cheeks, and finally pressed her closed lips against his and held them there, not a kiss, just breathing him in. David Palmer sat very still under her lips as though listening.

  “Oh, my heart,” she said. She had wanted to tell him something but now couldn’t remember what it was. The truth—whatever—had slipped eel-like away.

  “Lee, Lee, you’re a blessing. I’ve tried so hard to make you into a curse, but you’re not; you’re a blessing.”

  “Then for god’s sake, don’t ignore me. At least speak to me.”

  “Do you think that’s possible?” His hands trembled over hers. “I watch for your curly black head, always in the farthest back pew on the right and then at St. Jerome’s in the second pew, but never looking up at me. From the very first, something inside me turned upside down. I hoped you were single. Wasn’t that insane? What good would it have done? And then afterwards at the hospital when you had Lill, just over being pregnant.” He cautiously stroked her stomach.

  “As I am again,” Lee said, smoothing her white dress down, feeling an unhappy tenseness in her face, that her smile was one that follows a fit of weeping.

  Then taking her arm, as though afraid of breaking the connection, David Palmer rose and opened the French doors, letting in the sounds of the afternoon and the stale green odor of the neglected pool. He led her back, as one would lead a child who needed directing, to sit on the couch beside him.

  “For months now you have filled up all my thoughts, all my heart.”

  “At first, all I could see was how much younger you were than Father Kennedy, and how different.” She wanted to add, so much more devout, so much more interesting. “I started coming only to your Masses, and when you visited in the hospital, I didn’t know my gown was so thin.”

  “Or that you were so lovely. So full of joy over your new baby. I see so many women, resentful, unhappy. I watched you like a spy at school: talking to your little girls, always talking to them, holding their hands when you walked across the playground, pushing them on the swings and running under, having as much fun as they were.” He held her in the crook of his arm, the pale satin-striped couch around them like a small nest.

  Then they talked about her daughters, about how beautiful he’d made the rectory, an amorous chant as steady as the rustling of the leaves outside the French doors: “darling, dearest.” In their words was nothing new or original, only what every lover says to every lover, all the trite and tender words that could be said against an ear, against a cheek. Words that are unique and valuable only to the one who is listening.

  “You’ve come to every integrated Mass at St. Jerome’s, not missed a single one. Do you know what that means for me to see you there, to know you’re part of this revolution? And every Sunday”—he cleared his throat—“I’ve seen you getting larger.”

  He placed his hand on her swelling belly and slid off the couch to kneel on his knees in front of her, sinking his face into what was left of her lap. She stared down at the back of his head, reached and brushed the tops of his ears, straightened the bluish part which divided his ruffled hair. “My darling, darling David. My poor David.”

  In those first long days of silence, after the afternoon in the rectory, Lee had rehearsed something quite different to say, something hard and hateful. That if there ever was a chance, she would tell him—tell him how he should have called or written—or something. But, now he was here, on his knees in front of her. There seemed no long winter months in between the afternoon in the rectory and this respite. Her bitterness, so round and full at first, dwindled instantly, hardened into a seed, the pit of some unpleasant fruit she’d been forced to eat. She held it in her mouth and was silent.

  At last he rose to pour more wine. Lee motioned none for her, and then he sat on the floor next to her feet and smoothed her calf and knee with his fingers. He took off her shoe, holding and looking at her narrow stockinged foot as though seeing something strange and wonderful. It reminded Lee of his tracing the line of her hip, her nipple, the curve of her collarbone when they had been in the bed upstairs. He put his cheek to the top of her instep and kissed her toes.

  How weird, to have someone kiss her foot. Lee leaned back on the soft cushion of the couch, uneasy at this minute examination of what to her was a bony, long-toed appendage. A bug beat against the screen and the late April light ticked away the afternoon outside the French doors. David Palmer’s hand slid up the inside of her knee.

  She had to speak, had to say something to stop his hand. “Father Kennedy thinks this integration thing is all a big mistake, you know, somehow.”

  The hand continued stroking, each time a fraction higher. Was he seducing her? Would he want to go upstairs to his room? She tried to ignore his stroking fingers, tried to put the old priest’s reasons into an intelligent argument.

  “Father Kennedy says a retired priest has no voice in parish decisions, no more than a school child. He wants the consolidation to be done slower. He thinks closing the Queen of Peace School in Lakeland is a terrible mistake.”

  David’s fingers slid further up and were now on the inside of Lee’s thigh. She closed her legs, trapping his hand.

  “I know. He and Sister Ellen are practically at each other’s throats at every Home and School meeting. It’s disgraceful.”

  The priest pulled his hand away. “Can you believe me, that I want you right now? Want you, right here—eve—even in your condition.”

  He rose, shook his head as though trying to aw
ake from a dream.

  “Father Kennedy thinks the Lakeland children will have too long a ride into Strickland each morning.”

  Lee forgot the rest of the old priest’s complaint, something about freedom of choice—that there had to be a choice—but she asked the question that always ended his argument. “If color doesn’t matter, why can’t they stay in their own schools and with their own color if they want to?”

  David didn’t answer but sat up explaining, as he often said from the pulpit, that there were greater issues: “Dividing people according to skin color is barbaric, and the sooner we combine all our facilities, the better. Having two Catholic schools in an area this small is unnecessary.” He rose and drained his glass of wine as if concluding the speech. “Are you going to the meeting tonight?”

  The air in the room changed, and the world’s business slipped back in. The sounds of traffic, that had been only distant waves a moment before, increased, and reminded Lee that it was almost five o’clock: workers coming home, Charles might be back by six, and she had to cook supper.

  “Yes, probably. I have to give a report on the hamburger lunch program.”

  Lee was late for the meeting, coming into the back of the auditorium and sitting on a folding metal chair in the last row. She could tell Sister Ellen had been talking some few minutes, for her voice was even higher and more excited than usual. It was her integration lesson, the same one she’d given at every Home and School meeting for the last year, and whether the slumped, worn-out looking parents were in agreement, or just plain bored, was hard to tell. In front of the rows of metal chairs, the tall nun stood like a thin statue in black draperies. She swung her arms to emphasize her arguments and at the end of every third sentence pointed to the ceiling to remind everyone of God’s presence. As she spoke, she took a step forward and a step back, rocking; her black high-laced shoes creaked relentlessly, squeak, squeak. No one else noticed, and Lee knew she was aware of the squeaks only because of Father Kennedy who sat on the very first row.